by Jack Mars
Maya dropped the stun-gun onto the bed and rushed over to get her and Sara’s coats from the hook by the door, while Watson grabbed the suitcases.
But when Maya turned again, her younger sister was standing in front of the bound man in the armchair, facing him. “Sara?” she said hesitantly.
In one of the young girl’s hands was the stun-gun that Maya had dropped.
“Wait—” Maya started.
Sara jammed the pronged end into Nolan’s ribs. Every muscle in his body jerked in wild spasms as his head whipped back. The veins in his neck bulged; his eyes widened to the point they threatened to fall out. His mouth opened in a yawning scream, though no sound emerged other than the crackle of electricity coursing through him.
Sara’s expression was frighteningly flat as she held the stun-gun against him until the charge ran out, until his taut muscles relaxed and his head slumped forward.
“You were going to take us,” she murmured.
“Sara…” Maya prodded. “Sara, let’s just go—”
“He was going to take us!” She spun around to face her sister, and though tears were forming in her eyes were expression was furious and unforgiving. Maya took a small step back at the sight of her. “Just like before! Just like the others!” She shook her head. “No. Never again.”
“Sara,” said Agent Watson gently. But without warning, the young girl reached for the lamp on the bedside table. She grabbed it with both hand and yanked it out of the wall, not stopping, bringing it in a crushing blow across Nolan’s face.
Blood from his nose, mouth and lips spattered the wall. Maya’s stomach churned; she was certain she saw a few teeth bounce across the carpet.
“Never,” Sara said, her shoulders heaving, “again.” She brought the lamp up again, overhead this time, as if intent to crush the man’s skull.
Watson was on her in a second. He grabbed the lamp with one hand and wrapped the other around her midsection, half holding her back and half hugging her to him. “Hey,” he whispered hoarsely in her ear. “Hey. Listen to me. It’s not going to happen again, okay? I’m not going to let you out of my sight. But we have to go. Do you hear me? There may be more of them.”
Sara struggled for a moment in his grip, but then relaxed enough to relinquish her hold on the lamp. Nolan’s head lolled, the lower half of his face a bloody mess. Maya had to look away. She had never seen her sister act like that, or look like that, ever before. It was animalistic; she had responded to a brutal attack with brutality of her own. Despite Maya’s fear and apprehension, she couldn’t help but feel at least a little proud of her younger sister. She had experienced hell, and was determined to never go back. She wasn’t going to let herself be a victim again.
Watson let go of Sara, and then he grabbed up Nolan’s guns, the cell phone, and lastly their dad’s packed suitcase from the bed. “Come on.”
In the hall, Watson closed the door behind them as best he could with the broken jamb and hung the “Do Not Disturb” sign on the knob. He strode down the hall, a suitcase in one hand and his gun in the other, partially hidden behind his back. The girls followed quickly.
“You girls did well—really well. Your dad would be proud. Keep alert and follow me.”
“Agent Watson,” Maya asked as they hurried along, “what’s the Division?”
“They’re a, uh, private security force,” he explained. “Bunch of thugs, really.”
“But why were they here?” she pressed. “How did they find us? What does it mean?”
“I don’t know,” Watson said in answer to all of her questions. Maya had the distinct impression that Watson had some ideas, but if that was true he wasn’t elaborating. “Don’t you worry about that right now; let’s just get clear of here. I’m going to stay with you. I’ll watch your back and you’ll watch mine.” He paused before adding quietly, “Let’s just hope someone is watching your dad’s.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“How do you know about my girls?” Reid demanded in the small boxy building of the terrorist compound. He let his anger show, teeth bared, despite the Sig Sauer pointed at his forehead.
Fitzpatrick’s supercilious smirk was enough to set his teeth on edge, to make him want to risk getting shot just to have the opportunity to knock it from his face. “Don’t you worry none about that. You won’t be around long enough to find out anyhow.”
Reid’s pulse increased. He had expected that the mercenaries were there for him, not for the Brotherhood, but he hadn’t once considered that they might know where his daughters were. Alarms rang in his head; the muscles in his limbs tensed with the strain of keeping himself from recklessly attacking Fitzpatrick.
“They’re just kids,” Reid entreated. “They’re innocent. And if you have an ounce of humanity in you, you’ll leave them out of this.”
“Wish I could, if I’m being frank.” For a brief moment, a glimmer of remorse passed over Fitzpatrick’s face. “But there’s no such thing as innocent in what we do.” He sighed. “So long, Agent Zero.”
“Stop.” All five pairs of eyes turned at the sharp sound of Maria’s voice—not just Reid’s and Fitzpatrick’s, but the two injured men on the floor, and even the bound Iraqi. She stood in the doorway, just behind Fitzpatrick, her arm extended and holding something aloft… but it wasn’t a gun.
It was her cell phone.
Fitzpatrick craned his neck to look at her, though he kept the rifle trained on Reid. “Just what the hell are you doing?” he asked in confusion. “You gonna take me out with a phone?”
“No,” Maria replied. “With a video camera. I’m live-streaming this as we speak, to both my father on the National Security Council and a friend in the media.”
Fitzpatrick said nothing, but his lip curled in an angry snarl.
“And I’ve got a clear bead on you through that window.” Strickland’s voice came through their radio earpieces. “You shoot, you die next.”
Fitzpatrick’s snarl slowly transitioned into his familiar, ugly smirk. “Well,” he said. “If this ain’t some kind of twenty-first century Mexican standoff.”
“By all means,” Maria said behind him, “do what you came here to do—what you’re being paid for. Or… you can take that truck out in the courtyard, put your men in it, and drive out of here. Go back to whoever’s paying you and tell them you failed. And if we ever see you or any of your people again, we won’t hesitate to drop you.”
“Trust me, darling,” said Fitzpatrick. “Next time, you won’t see us comin’.” The barrel of his Sig Sauer lowered slowly. “Time to go, boys.”
Maria stepped aside, still keeping the camera of her cell phone pointed in his direction, as Fitzpatrick backed out of the doorway. The two mercenaries on the floor rose slowly and did the same, one cradling his broken wrist and the other bleeding from the nose.
Outside, Fitzpatrick let out a sharp whistle for his other three men. Maria watched through the window as two of the Division members pushed open the heavy gates of the compound, and then got into the old truck, the bed stretched over with canvas. The engine rumbled to life, and the truck slowly rolled out of the compound.
“You two okay?” Strickland asked through the radio.
“Yeah,” Reid said. “Thanks to both of you. Todd, I need you to get on the phone with Watson immediately. Fitzpatrick said something about my daughters…”
“I’m on it,” Strickland said.
Reid nodded to Maria. “Were you actually streaming that?”
“Of course not,” she said. “I don’t have any friends in the media, and I certainly wouldn’t send it to my father. But I did record it. Might come in handy later.”
“Nice job.”
“Now what?” she asked.
“First, I need to make sure Maya and Sara are okay. The chopper should be back any minute. If you can get this guy out to the landing zone, I’ll help Strickland with the other three.”
“Sure thing.” Maria took the bound terrorist by the arm and hefte
d him to his feet.
He cursed at her in Arabic, calling her several untoward things and suggesting she should keep her repugnant hands off of him.
She smiled pleasantly and told him in his native tongue, “Where you’re going, you’re going to wish we let them put a bullet in your head.”
Reid ran over to the main building and up the stairs to meet Strickland, who had taken a position in bin Mohammed’s bedroom near the window with his MP5.
“Did you get through?” he asked immediately.
Strickland nodded. “They’re with Watson and safe. Apparently there was some trouble; a member of the Division showed up at their hotel room, claiming to be CIA. But your girls subdued him and tied him to a chair.”
Reid blinked in surprise. “Sorry, what?”
Strickland grinned. “Maybe you don’t need to worry as much as you think you do.”
“I guess not,” Reid murmured.
“They’re getting on a plane right now and heading back to the states. Watson is going to take them to a safe house and wait with them.”
“Good,” Reid said. He could hardly imagine what his daughters might have done to subdue an armed mercenary—but he would get the full story later. For now, he turned his attention to the stout man kneeling in the corner with his hands bound behind his back, the alleged leader of the Brotherhood, Awad bin Saddam.
He heard the familiar sound of rotors from outside as the Black Hawk returned to collect them. Besides bin Saddam they had three others detained to take with them, including the injured terrorist in the hall that Maria had shot in the legs.
“Where to next?” Strickland asked.
Reid stared down bin Saddam, but the older man refused to meet his gaze, instead looking down at the floor. “To Morocco,” he said. “We don’t have a new lead, but I’m sure we’ll get one after we put the fear of hell into this man.”
*
“So,” said Strickland once the jet was at cruising altitude, carrying the three agents towards Morocco. “You want to tell me what that was all about now?”
Reid and Maria exchanged a dubious glance. He knew the younger agent would ask as soon as they were alone.
The Black Hawk helicopter, down six mercenaries but with four new detainees, had taken them back to Baghdad, to an American military installation where a jet was waiting. The insurgent that Maria had shot was losing a lot of blood and stayed behind to be attended to; the other three were put on an army cargo plane bound for H-6 while the CIA operatives boarded the Gulfstream.
To Strickland’s credit, he had at least waited until they were in the air.
Reid was torn. On the one hand, Agent Strickland deserved answers; he had helped to save Reid’s life back at the compound without knowing why the Division had turned on him. On the other hand, the young agent’s career with the CIA had barely begun. To tell him anything would be to implicate him with knowledge of the plot—and potentially put him in the same line of fire that Reid found himself in.
“If you’re worried about putting me in some kind of danger,” Strickland said, as if reading Reid’s mind, “don’t be. I can handle myself just fine. Gave you a pretty good fight once, didn’t I?”
Reid scoffed. “You might have given me a little trouble…” On their first encounter, when Strickland had been sent to arrest Agent Zero, the two had a brief skirmish just outside of Grodkow, Poland, which had ended with Strickland in handcuffs and Reid with his gun.
He turned to Maria questioningly. She sighed and nodded once in assent.
“Okay,” Reid said quietly. “I may regret this later, but here it is. Two years ago, before the memory suppressor was put in my head, I knew some things. I had discovered that there is a plan to initiate a manufactured war between the United States and certain targets in the Middle East.”
“A manufactured war?” Strickland frowned. “As in, unprovoked?”
“Or there’s going to be a provocation,” Reid said. “Whether it’s genuine or not will be the question.”
“But why?”
“The simplest answer is usually the right one,” Maria replied. “Oil. The rich want to be richer and those in power want to stay there, and while they’ve all got their hands in that pot there are certain territories that just can’t be trusted to remain stable. Over the last thirty years, we’ve tried diplomacy. We’ve tried military presence. We’ve tried establishing democracy, and nothing has stuck. Somewhere down the line, someone realized that the best way to keep particular assets safe is if we simply own them. They believe a war can do that for the United States—ensure our total control of key areas that also happen to be major oil production locations.”
Strickland breathed a heavy sigh. “That’s… that’s just appalling.” He thought for a long moment before he looked up at them, his gaze turning angry. “You know I did three tours in the Middle East? Two with the Army, and one as a Ranger, alongside Special Forces. In each one, we lost good men. Great men. In each one, I saw things that never should be allowed to happen, anywhere. Some of those guys used to joke that our job there was to keep some fat, wealthy politician in his chair…” Strickland shook his head. “But it was always just a joke.”
“It was never just a joke,” Maria murmured.
“Who?” he demanded. “Who’s involved in this?”
“We don’t know,” Reid told him. “But it would have to be a lot of people, all high up the chain. Which brings us to the crux of the matter.” He paused for a moment before saying, “I believe that Deputy Director Riker might be in on this, or at least responsible for keeping things quiet.”
Strickland looked up sharply.
“And possibly Director Mullen as well,” Maria added.
“Our bosses?” The young agent was at a complete loss. “I can’t believe that…”
“And yet mercenaries hired by our own agency basically admitted that they were sent there to kill me,” Reid noted. “Think about it. After everything that went down in Slovakia, why wasn’t I thrown into the same kind of pit we’re about to visit? Instead, they pardoned me. Hell, they even kept me on the job.”
“To keep you close,” Strickland said, nodding with a faraway look in his eye. “To keep an eye on you and try to figure out how much you know.”
“And to see if I’ll act on it,” said Reid. “Now they reinstate me as an agent, lying and telling me I have a personal connection to this op—only to have the Division turn on me? This is a ploy to get rid of me before I rediscover what I knew back then. Someone gave the order. Jury’s still out on Cartwright, but I’d bet every memory in my head that Riker is in on this.”
“Jesus,” the young agent muttered. “So what do we do?”
“For now,” Maria said, “we finish our op. We have their leader; we find out why they bombed the embassy and what else is up their sleeve. In that video, bin Saddam threatened there was more to come.”
“But I want you to distance yourself from me,” Reid told him. “Outwardly, as far as anyone else is concerned, we’re not friends. Share in Riker’s disdain for me, if you can. Complain about me. Try to get me off your op. See if she tries to get you into her little inner circle.”
Maria nodded in agreement. “It’s more than likely that the Division has already reported back, so don’t lie when asked about it. There was a confrontation; they drew on Kent, and you had to intervene and diffuse it. You dismissed them from the op for being reckless and disobeying your orders. That’s it.”
“Alright,” Strickland agreed. “I’ll help you get to the bottom of this. But in the meantime… I guess we’re enemies.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
It was nearly eleven p.m. local time when they arrived at the CIA black site designated H-6, or as it was called by those familiar with it, Hell-Six. The grounds of the site had been built to resemble a military forward operating base in the Moroccan desert, surrounded in chain-link fencing topped with barbed wire and comprised of semi-permanent canvas tents and squat, domed steel stru
ctures.
The Gulfstream landed on a short, bumpy airstrip just outside the site and the stairs was lowered. The desert air was cool and comfortable, though the stars waned in the glow of powerful floodlights that lit the black site from every angle.
A Special Forces member jogged over to them as they disembarked. He wore sunglasses perched on his forehead, despite the darkness, and an olive drab scarf around his neck. His tac vest and fatigue pants were the same color as the sand, and an automatic rifle hung from a strap over one shoulder.
“Welcome back, Agents,” said SFO Sergeant Jack Flagg, shaking each of their hands in turn.
“Sergeant Flagg,” Reid greeted. They had met only once before—at least that Reid could recall—when he had come here to interrogate a prisoner that was masquerading as a sheik named Mustafar, a known ally of Amun.
“Flagg?” said Strickland in surprise. “Green Berets?”
“That’s right,” the sergeant said.
“I’m Strickland. Seventy-fifth regiment.”
“Ranger?” said Flagg. “No kidding. Wait—Strickland. From Kandahar?”
“That’s right.” Strickland grinned as the two of them shook heartily.
“Well, Ranger, welcome to the luxurious Special Forces retirement village,” Flagg said with a laugh. “Come on, I’ll show you around. Our guests should be arriving shortly.” The two of them walked ahead, chatting idly about post-military life.
Reid glanced at Maria. She shrugged. “Boys, right?” She followed them into the encampment.
The cargo plane arrived thirty minutes later. Reid sipped weak coffee and watched from behind the barbed wire fence as a half-dozen of Flagg’s men escorted the three detainees from the hold and through the gates.
“I’ll take bin Saddam,” he told Maria and Strickland. “You two handle the others. We need to know why they targeted the congressional delegation and what else they have planned.”
“And why there were so few members at the compound,” Strickland added. “I don’t believe for a second that the Brotherhood is only eight men.”
